


Smiling at grief

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Post-Canon, References to Shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 09:02:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28900827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Nicola helps Lawrie run some lines for a play, and notices things have... changed. Just a little bit, but for the better.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 33





	Smiling at grief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AellaIrene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AellaIrene/gifts).



> To AellaIrene's prompt for "I am all the daughters of my father's house/and all the brothers too."

‘But died thy sister of her love?’ Nicola said, in an especially flat, line-feeding voice. She’d thought, when she first agreed to this imposition on the acres of leisure following seventh-term Oxford entrance, that she knew all about _Twelfth Night_ : twin sister dresses as boy, twin brother actually shows up, mistaken-identity high jinks ensue. She quickly discovered that, in fact, all she knew came from Tim’s veto every time it arose as a dramatic possibility at Kingscote: _Ugh. All those feeble coincidences. It’s just the higher Christmas panto, really._ But it wasn’t like that at all: the farce was suffused with something queer and sad, like a winter afternoon near sunset.

‘I am all the daughters—’ Lawrie exclaimed with an intonation that was more Kenneth Williams than artless ingenue. ‘Damn. That’s useless. How would you do it?’

‘How would I—?’ Nicola closed the script on her thumb and blinked. Lawrie never asked that. She always _knew_ absolutely, or absolutely _didn’t_. Maybe RADA was teaching her something about other people, after all. ‘Haven’t the faintest,’ she said heartily. ‘ _Not_ my department.’

Lawrie snorted demonstratively, like the Idiot Boy in a refusing mood, then turned a shrewd, sidelong eye on her twin.

‘Isn’t it?’ 

‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

‘You know.’

She was right: Nicola did. And she didn’t want to talk about drowned brothers so Lawrie could do one of her Stan-whatsis-ski jobs with the memory.

‘I can do you being frantic.’ Lawrie clapped her hands behind her back, locked her jaw and glared out of the playroom window. It was a bit much, and Nicola was about to jump up, punch her shoulder and say _you ass_ when Lawrie's rictus faltered into a full-body shudder, and she not only saw it wasn’t overdone at all, she could actually feel herself doing it.

‘Then,’ Lawrie said comfortably, becoming herself again and hitching the waistband of her jeans up over her hipbones, ‘you go off on a mad _initiative_.’ 

'But Viola’s past the frantic stage,’ Nicola said slowly, thinking that if she refocussed things on the part, the play, it would probably be all right, she wouldn’t have to snap, or bolt. ‘She’s Patience on a monument, she’s resigned to—’ she swallowed. ‘Him. Being gone.’

It was ridiculous, still to _feel_ , so long after and when there was nothing to feel _about_ , all’s well that ends well. Especially absurd, when not nine months ago Giles had been at war, war-war, not Cod War (ha ha)—and in the only honest-to-goodness ship-to-ship engagement thereof, to boot—and she’d only felt pride and affection for him and his elderly, knock-kneed frigate. Admittedly, she’d only known about that in retrospect. And if _Surfrider_ had propelled Peter towards the _terra firma_ of an engineering degree rather than the family tradition, it was also true that he was having an absolute whale of a time in Manchester, and not regretting it a bit. The home front—Rowan, and, on the rare occasions when she left her punishing hospital schedule, Ann—well, the Matthew 6:34 expedient was probably the best they were ever going to do there. But it had, once again, held until Ann returned to London.

‘Nick. Nick!’ Lawrie, insofar as one could ever from five foot two, was suddenly looming over her. 'That’s it!’

‘What?’

‘You—there. You were exactly it. I’ve got it now. She blurts out “daughters” and then she _freezes_ , and the logical word to climb out of the hole with is “sons”, but “brothers” pops out inst—I say, never mind. About time for elevenses, don’t you think?’

Over coffee and a slab of Mrs Bertie’s porter cake, Nick wondered just how stricken she must have looked, to have provoked _tact,_ however belated _,_ in her twin sister. Or perhaps, that too was a RADA acquisition, and all their parents’ reservations about drama school only increasing Lawrie’s self-absorption misplaced. Hey ho, Nicola thought cheerfully, and if the wind and rain that always seemed to envelop her thoughts about this time of year did not clear entirely, she felt a little more able to face into them with equanimity.

**Author's Note:**

> On the _Run Away Home_ timeline. Giles is imagined having served in the Falklands War, on HMS _Yarmouth_.


End file.
